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Catalog, :'''' ,:' '", ,,,' :, :' ".T':::::; (800) 7 6 7 ..6411 w":::'" ,:: ". :::;,,, ,;'::: "; ;:: ; t:' ':': :':;;it^':'" " );()f Web: breakell.com '* }.H. Breakell & Co. 132 Spring Street, Dept. NLBB Newport, RI 02840 160 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 18 & 25 2001 ize"? Or "to ellipsifY'? There ought to be. Compressed first-person narrations don't tell any kind of story; they tend to project a few distinctive moods. A surfeit of experiences that bring worldly wis- dom (and, usually, disenchantment) is often intimated. It's hard to imagine a naïve narrator with a penchant for apho- ristic summ Such moods color the whole span of the narration, which can darken but does not, strictly speaking, develop. In fictions narrated by a resident observer, the end lies much closer to the beginning than in fictions enhanced by digressions. Not just because the novel is shorter but because the look is retro- spective and the tale one whose end is known from the beginning. However straightforward the narration tries to be, it can't help registering a few tremors of anticipated pathos: the pathos of the al- ready known, and the not prevented. The beginning will be an early variant on the end, the end a late, somewhat deflat- ing variant on the beginning. Stories kept lean by ellipsis and re- fined judgments rather than fattened by essayistic expansiveness may look like a quicker read. They're not. Even with sentences that are fired like bullets, at- tention can wander. Every exquisite lin- guistic moment (or incisive insight) is a moment of stasis, a potential ending. Aphoristic finalities sap forward mo- mentum, which thrives on more loosely woven sentences. "Sleepless Nights"-a novel of mental weather-enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narra- tive voice, its lithe, semi-staccato de- scriptions and epigrammatic dash. It has no shape in the usual novelistic sense. It has no shape as the weather has no shape. Like the weather, it arrives and departs, rather than, in the usual struc- tured wa begins and ends. A first-person voice devoted to look- ing and reflecting is likely to be drawn to reporting its displacements, as if that were mainly what a solitary consciousness does with its time. Fictions with melan- choly or frankly superior narrators are often travellers' tales, stories of a wander- ing of some sort, or a halt in that wan- dering. "The Pilgrim Hawk" takes place among the peripatetic rich. The staid ac- ademic village depicted in "Pictures from an Institution" is fùll of success:fiù profes- sionals coming from or on their way to somewhere else. Such well-oiled travels are about as dramatic as the story gets. Perhaps the fictions that condense have to be relatively plotless, large brawling events being better accommodated in fat books. Many displacements are recorded in "Sleepless Nights," none unconnected with a lifetime of incessant reading, fat books and thin: From Kentucky to New York" to Boston to Maine, to Europe, carried along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank verse, of little books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian-all consumed in a sedentary sleeplessness. Is that suffi- cient-never mind that it is the truth. The voyaging of the bookish, un- doubtedlya source of many keen plea- sures, is nevertheless an occasion for iron as if one's life had failed to meet an agreed standard of interest. A career of mental travelling, illustrated by a fair bit of real travelling in safety and relative comfort, doesn't make for a very exciting plot. "It certainly hasn't the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate mas- ter on the dock and signed up for the journe But after all"-best to name the formidable constraint unknown to other representatively brilliant first-person nar- " B - 1:. all ' I ' " rators- ut alter , am a woman. C ompared with beginnings, endings of novels are less likely to resound, to have an aphoristic snap. What they convey is the permission for tensions to subside. They are more like an effect than a statement. "The Pilgrim Hawk" starts with the Cullens' arrival and stops very soon after they leave. "Pictures from an Institution" also draws to a close with a departure, ac- tually two departures. To the joy of all, Gertrude and her husband are on the train back to New York City the moment the spring term ends. Then we learn that the narrator himself: having accepted the offer of a better job at another college, will be leaving Benton soon, with some regret and more than a little relief "The Pilgrim Hawk" signs off with an ambiguous reflection about marriage. Tower claims to be worrying about the effect on Alex of the spectacle of the Cullens' torment: "You'll never marry, dear,' I said, to tease Alex. . . . "You'll be afraid to, after this fan- tastic bad luck." "What bad luck, if you please?" she in-